The secrets of the universe are soon to be revealed! I am Baba Doodlius, and I know all! Well, truth be told I only know "most", but since nobody knows "all" I can just make up the stuff I don't know and nobody will be the wiser. That's the First Secret of Baba Doodlius! More to come.
Oh, and for the best frames in the whole wide world go to Custom frame Morgan Hill CA.

Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Howdy again folks. I'm pretty much memed out, but Poetikat tagged me to do this one and I'm gonna go ahead and do it because it's kinda related to my regular schtick: Revealing Mysteries.

These are personal Mysteries. It's a list of 10 things about me that nobody knows. (Well, almost nobody - Mrs. Doodlius knows everything.)

So, no Mytery of the Universe today, and instead it's 10 Mysteries of a tiny little corner of the Universe known as Baba Doodlius. So without further ado, here are

10 Mysterious Things about the Great and Powerful Baba Doodlius

1) I introduced Kermit the Frog to the concept that "It Isn't Easy Being Green". And he never gave me credit for it.

Ungrateful frog. Never trust a frog that's not being served to you in a French restaurant.

2) I invented the feather duster. It was an accident, really - I got my ass stuck under the fridge. Icky!

3) I love eggs. Eggs are yummy! Poached, especially.

4) I once fought and destroyed a cyborg from the future.

He looked all cute and fuzzy until you saw the robotic endoskeleton. He was tough, but nothing I couldn't handle. He won't be back!

5) I set the world record* for "most wooden blocks chewed up in one hour" in 1969. It still stands. Take that, macaws!

Macaws get all the press because of their colorful feathers, but I can beat the best of 'em in a wood chewing contest!

6) My brain is larger than the dimensions of my head. It only fits in there due to an anomaly in the space-time continuum.

7) I am the Universal Master of Bird Fu. Actually, I alluded to this little factoid once before, but never revealed that I am, in fact, the Universal Master. Bird Fu was how I defeated the cyborg from #4, above; I used the deadly "Crouching Parrot" technique. You shoulda seen it, it was epic!

8) I once painted my toenails. Purple. I think it was because of the Oxycontin. Whoops, said too much.

9) I was an uncredited backup singer on the song "Postcards from Paraguay", on Mark Knopfler's 2004 album "Shangri-La". I'm great with harmony!

Mark Knopfler is cool, and can really play that guitar. He isn't as much into parrots as Jimmy Buffett, though.

10) I hate spiders. What with the Bird Fu and all, I know I could take 'em, but the thought of them crawling over my beak while I'm sleeping totally gives me the willies. You know what I'm talking about!

So there you have it. Ten Mysterious things about me that you always wanted to know. Or not. Whatever, I did the meme.

Have a nice day!

* There is an unfortunate asterisk on my wood-block-chewing world record. I used a performance-enhancing substance: titanium beak implants. Hey, they weren't illegal at the time!

Saturday, January 26, 2008

Sorry for the delay since the last post, but I've been pretty busy. Mostly I've been consulting teams of lawyers about the information you're about to read. They say it's OK now, so here goes:

Moooog35 guessed it: When I went looking for D.B. Cooper in the woods of Oregon and discovered that he made a nice little Cooper-shaped crater on the forest floor, I also found his ill-gotten loot!

In a moment of greedy, weak, avaricious, selfishness, I took it for myself!

Oh, woe is me! I have been found out! Life can never be the same again! And it's been horrible - Horrible I say! - living a lie all this time! Having to hide in trees whenever a police officer came by! Being forced to read all those books about money laundering! Having to pay huge brokerage fees! Those damn fees really bite you in the shorts!

But let me start at the beginning of this long, sordid tale.

It was 1971 when I found all that D.B. Cooper money, and I had to lie low for a while until the heat died down. In 1972 I figured it was time to do something with that cash, but at the time I knew nothing about high finance. Plus I was a bird, and when you're a bird it's hard to just waltz into a bank or somewhere like that dragging a suitcase full of cash and not draw some suspicion. So I called up one of my best human friends to give me a hand:

"Baba, my main bird, If you got some extra money, I say keep it in the family! I got this distant relative named Warren who knows all about what to do with money, so I'll get you in touch with him and he'll set you up!"

This is how, in 1972, I came to buy 3,000 shares of Warren Buffett'sBerkshire Hathaway stock.

Today these shares sell for about $130,000.

Each.

I'm a bird with dough! My friends don't call me "Greenback Baba" because of the color of my feathers! Having virtually unlimited money is pretty cool - with tons of money, an otherwise ordinary Joe can become anything he wants.

Having nearly unlimited money allowed Bruce Wayne to go from being a loser with a bad attitude to a caped Superhero!

I'm not really the superhero type, so I had to think of something else to do with a huge wad of cash. What does a bird do when he has more money than you can shake a jewel-encrusted stick at?

1) I got lucky.

Oooh, twins!

When it comes to bird nookie, I've tried' em all, from sparrows to spoonbills, wood ducks to warblers - if it could be bought, I bought it. I won't get into the details here (you can all just use your sick, twisted imaginations), but suffice it to say that lovebirds have absolutely nothing on rainbow lorikeets!

Hubba Hubba! Wow, she was in-effin-credible.

I know this sort of behavior is frowned upon today, but all that was back in the '70's when things were pretty crazy. And of all this promiscuity, I can tell you that I really have no egrets. (Ha ha, a little bird humor there.)

2) I Bought a boat

Everybody with scads of cash eventually buys a boat. I got this one in the early 80's, and I thought it was great:

But it was just a little too small, though - I barely had room for a butler on board. So I bought another one:

That's a great boat. But eventually it also turned out to be too small: I could land my helicopter on it, but when I bought an airplane I wanted a boat with a landing strip, so I had to get something bigger:

I haven't bought it yet, but I have my eye on another boat now:

Whaddaya think, too ostentatious?

3) I got some pets for the house

Well, they aren't exactly pets - they're more like employees. This one is Phil, my personal attorney, during some rare downtime (when he's not working on a copyright infringement case or something):

He looks pretty content here. He should for what I pay him.

I figure if people can keep birds in cages in their houses, I can keep humans in cages in my house. Hey, it's only fair! And in case you were wondering, humans, like most birds, don't mind this sort of thing much so long as you pay them well. Unfortunately for me, money is generally the only pay a human will accept, unlike most birds who will take, literally, peanuts.

4) I Started my own company

I figured I'd use my natural talents at mystery solving to fill some of my spare time and help some people out, so I opened the Eagle Eye Detective Agency in the 90's.

Nobody would hire a bird detective, so I had to hire a figurehead human so I could drum up some business.

He said his name was "Norelco Irons", but I'm sure that was an alias. He was pretty suave and talked with an accent, so he was good at shmoozing and doing public appearances, but he was dumb as a bag of rocks and useless on an investigation. All he would do was say some stupid one-liner every now and again and that made him feel like he was contributing. I guess if you don't pay very well you have to take what you can get. Oh well. Live and learn.

I closed the agency after a few years anyway - I figured I could still do mystery solving without having to pay corporate taxes, so that's what I do now.

So there you have it: the mystery of what happened to D.B. Cooper's money, all wrapped up in a neat little package. And now that you know the Truth, don't you be hitting me up for any loans - I'm a cheap bastard. And you can't threaten to turn me in, because the statute of limitations expired years ago (I don't pay all those lawyers for nothing, you know). I think I'll go light a fire in the hearth with some 100-dollar bills now. Have a nice day!

Thursday, January 3, 2008

Howdy again all you powerlifters doing the clean-and-jerk of Truth! Baba Doodlius here, with a Revelation of another Mystery of the Universe!

I've got a Mystery Revelation this week that should have been taken care of a long time ago. It's one that goes back only 36 years, but it's one of those things that people dredge up off the bottom of the Great Cosmic Mystery Pile (GCMP*) every now and again and try to make a big deal of. And somebody did it again just the other day. I'm so tired of this one that I'm going to Reveal to all of you once and for all the Real Truth behind the Mystery of

D. B. Cooper!

If you've been reading the news lately, you may have seen that The F.B.I., that famous Institute of Mystery Solvers in the U.S. of A., has re-opened the 36-year-old case file of the infamous skyjacker known as D.B. Cooper, the only skyjacking in the history of the sky that has never been solved. Apparently the F.B.I. is once again admitting that this Mystery has them stumped.

So here's the whole story, in case you have forgotten it:

A guy calling himself Dan Cooper (later known as "D.B.") hijacked a plane out of Portland, Oregon, USA in November 1971, and demanded $200,000 USD and four parachutes. These being delivered to him, he ordered that the plane take off and head for Reno, Nevada (of all places). Once in the air, he strapped on a parachute and left the plane somewhere over Oregon with his bag of cash. The F.B.I. has been looking for him ever since.

Here's the composite sketch of D.B. Cooper. Yeah, I know, that could be any balding, non-descript, goofy white guy.

A couple of people have claimed to be D.B. Cooper during deathbed confessions, and the F.B.I. has had oodles of suspects, but nobody has ever been able to prove what happened after D.B. took his famous flying leap.

Apparently the F.B.I. is still looking, because they came out with a press release about ol' D.B. just a few days ago. Well, I'm sick of this Mystery cropping back up over and over. And, since I am the Great and Powerful Baba Doodlius and I happen to know exactly what happened to D.B. Cooper, I'm going to settle this once and for all, right now.

So here's the real story:

I am a bird, and birds are flight-capable (most of us, anyway - sorry to rub it in, Opus).In case you were wondering, Berkeley Breathed does not know that I used this copyrighted picture of Opus the Penguin in this blog, and if he did I'm fairly certain he'd tell me to cut it the heck out.

So, when in 1971 I heard about all these D.B. Cooper schenanagins, I figured I'd check it all out for myself. Being a decent flyer, I went to Oregon and followed the route of D.B.'s plane. Nearabouts where he abandoned ship, I started looking around. After a short while I saw this scene:

Now that may not look like much to you, but I'm a bird with a great pair'o'peepers, so I saw exactly the evidence I was looking for. I'll zoom in a little so you can see what I'm talking about:

See that little mud puddle in the middle of all those trees? I'll zoom in one more time:

So there you have it. D.B. Cooper may have made quite an impression on the American psyche, but he made an even bigger impression on the mud of rural Oregon. Yep, the chute didn't open and D.B. went splat. No more mystery, F.B.I., so you can stop looking.

And the money, you ask? Well, uh, nobody ever found the money. Certainly not me. No way! And $200,000 wouldn't have bought that much bird food anyway, or a nice camera, or a house in the suburbs, or a really rollicking night with Betty Bluebird... uh, where was I? Oh, right, nobody ever found the money!

The Great and Powerful Baba Doodlius

Let me explain... no, there is too much. Let me sum up:

The Great and Powerful Baba Doodlius is a citizen of the Universe, and resides there full time. He enjoys eating, sleeping, chewing up blocks of wood, and pondering the deepest secrets of the Cosmos that have remained unexhumed and unexamined for countless millenia. All that and he's darned cute as well.